Tag Archives: Weapons research

This is a revised and updated version of a post first published on 4 November 2015. Nothing much has changed, you see.

On Sunday, November 10th, after the remembrance services have ended in London’s Whitehall and elsewhere, a service for the other war-dead will take place at the Animals in War memorial in Park Lane (at 3 p.m.). The event is organized by the Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals, but there will also be members of Catholic Concern for Animals there, and of Quaker Concern for Animals – and for that matter adherents of other faiths or of no faith, since the wickedness of involving other species in our wars is self-sufficiently plain, regardless of what else we may believe. Therefore it is an occasion for anyone to attend who can: religion may be its language, but its sentiment is universal decency.

The memorial itself was designed by the sculptor David Backhouse, and built there in 2004. Its commissioning and making were a notable achievement, giving permanent and very public recognition for the first time to the part which animals have been made to play in human wars.

In letters cut into its white Portland stone, the memorial declares “This monument is dedicated to all the animals that served and died alongside British and Allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time.” Officially, therefore, it remembers only the animals who sided with ‘us’, rather than all the animals who have anywhere been forced, tricked, or otherwise induced to risk their lives in war-efforts. In this respect, perhaps disappointingly, it’s a very traditional war memorial. Unlike the Brown Dog memorial to vivisected animals, located a few miles away in Battersea Park, it is not a statement of dissent.

However, at least it doesn’t glorify or sentimentalize its subject. The suffering of the animals, and their preference for freedom, are plainly shown. Burdened, crowded, unnaturally jumbled as to species like the ruin of Noah’s Ark which war indeed makes of them, they press towards a gap in the curving stone stockade and the freedom of the grass and trees beyond – a freedom actually reached and enjoyed by a great bronze horse and dog. And any disingenuousness in that word “served” is properly corrected by the brief but eloquent sentence cut into the stone by itself at the far right: “They had no choice.”

Better still would have been ‘They have no choice’, reminding the visitor to this monument that ‘they’ are not simply history, but have a countless posterity today and to come. Perhaps in fact this memorial does have too much of a historical – specifically a First World War – feel about it. But then that was the war in which animals were most visibly used: not just the ubiquitous horses but, as the memorial shows, mules, camels, dogs, cats, pigeons, even elephants. But yes, horses most visibly and numerously of all. Hence that cry of distress in a letter written by the composer Edward Elgar as early as 25 August 1914: “Concerning the war I say nothing – the only thing that wrings my heart and soul is the thought of the horses – oh! my beloved animals . . . Oh, my horses.” About 1 million of the horses used by Britain and its allies on the Western Front are said to have lost their lives. Some of these horses belonged to cavalry regiments, but most had been requisitioned from farms, haulage companies, livery stables, and private owners. They knew, therefore, even less of war than the conscripted men whom they “served and died alongside”. Across the whole war, perhaps 8 million horses lost their lives.

But despite this profligate use of horses, the First World War was the one which set the style for modernity in battle, where humans and animals would be only the perishable element in a contest largely to be characterized and determined by science and machinery. And here the setting of the memorial is unpleasantly apt: not a pastoral or even a tolerably quiet scene, but Park Lane’s contribution to carmageddon, vehicles hustling past on either side (the memorial is in between the two carriage-ways), suggesting in their roar and stink that peace, in a consumerist society, is only the continuation of war in other forms and with other sorts of casualty.

There is one aspect of that war, however, about which the memorial says nothing. It was the First World War, specifically its science front, which enlisted animals into a wholly new variety of war work: weapons research. For the UK, this began in 1916 at the government’s research station on Porton Down, with the study of poison gas.

Such research is the least glorious and photogenic of all types of war service for animals to participate and die in. It offers no scope for the mutual affection and loyalty suggested in that telling word “alongside” in the text of the memorial. It won’t earn any animal the PDSA’s Dickin Medal, with its inscription “For Gallantry (we also serve)”. All the more reason, then, to give it this much recognition: a place among the representations here in Park Lane. But most unfortunately no such place is made for it. There are no images of monkeys by which to recall, for instance, their service to ‘allied forces’ on the hellish Primate Equilibrium Platforms at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, as described by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation, or their continuing service at Porton Down, testing the fatal effects of biological agents. There are no dolphins or whales to memorialize the ways in which their kind have served in cruel and unnatural trials at the Kaneohe Bay Naval Undersea Centre near Pearl Harbour. (It was about these last experiments that the marine biologist Jacques Cousteau commented, “No sooner does man discover intelligence, than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity.”) Nor are any pigs shown on the memorial, to record the use of their deliberately injured bodies in the training of British military surgeons – a practice which still goes on, as a minister of defence recently confirmed (in July 2019): “live but fully anaesthetised pigs are given bullet and blast wounds which are then treated in real-time exercises by surgical teams.”

Likewise absent is any word or image to recall the hecatombs of animals put to use during and after the Second World War in research for the newly developed atomic weaponry. Even before the first test explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the scientists preparing for it had enjoyed the use of “an animal farm” for research into radiation. When two atomic bombs were tested at Bikini Atoll immediately after the war, a number of the so-called “ghost ships”, placed in the target area to evidence the effects of the bombs, had animals on board: pigs, goats, rats, mice. Some of the animals were shaved “so that the effects of heat and radiation on their skins could be observed.” All of them died as a result, either at once or soon after. By the 1960s, about 5 million animals were being used every year just in research sponsored by the USA’s Atomic Energy Commission. And of course such research didn’t stop when the habit of testing bombs did. In the year before the Park Lane memorial was completed, an article in the journal Radiation Research had confirmed the continuing usefulness of such research; it was titled ‘Mortality of Atomic Bomb Survivors Predicted from Laboratory Animals’.

The exigencies of battle itself may impose cruel demands upon the animals innocently induced to take part. The Park Lane memorial records something of those demands with proper sadness and respect, if without explicit protest. But fear of war, which is what has driven the atomic research and other research into weapons of mass destruction, is an even more pitiless taskmaster. At a House of Lords committee hearing on animal research some years ago, one witness (backing the work being done at Porton Down) spoke of the possibility that pneumonic plague might be used as an infective agent against us in war: “For an agent like that there is virtually no price not worth paying to get an effective antidote.” He meant, of course, ‘not worth their paying’. The familiar mixture of cowardice and ruthlessness in that attitude – qualities so antithetical to the conduct of war as we prefer to remember it in our memorials – perhaps explains why this aspect of the war-work of non-human animals was omitted in Park Lane. It’s simply too ignoble to be willingly remembered.

For a short but excellent and well-illustrated account of the part horses were made to take in the First War, see Simon Butler, The War Horses: the Tragic Fate of a Million Horses Sacrificed in the First World War, Halsgrove, 2011. The numbers given above are from Butler’s book, pp.48 and 118.

The Dickin Medal was instituted in 1943 by the founder of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, Maria Dickin. The first recipients of it were three pigeons.

The experiments using the Primate Equilibrium Platform are described by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation (Pimlico Books, 1995; first published 1975) pp.25-29; those at Kaneohe Bay in Richard Ryder, Victims of Science (Poynter Davis, 1975), pp.79-80, where also Jacques Cousteau is quoted. Because weapons research is especially secretive, up-to-date information is not easily available, but some examples of work done for military purposes at Porton Down and also at British universities can be seen on the Animal Justice Project web-site at https://animaljusticeproject.com/the-secret-war/. The statement about pigs used in surgical training was made on 23 July 2019 by Minister of Defence Tobias Ellwood as part of a written answer to a question put to the government, at the request of Animal Aid, by Ben Lake MP.

The quotation “For an agent like that …” comes from evidence given by Dr Lewis Moonie, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence, to the Lords’ Select Committee on Animals in Scientific Procedures, April 2002.